China enlists AI to speed up monitoring and prediction of earthquakes

Testing of the new system in Yunnan and Sichuan provinces further escalates China’s efforts to apply AI technology across a range of sectors

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Part of the destroyed Xuankou Middle School, located in the town of Yingxiu in Wenchuan County, serves as a memorial site for the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Photo: Agence France-Presse

Published: 5:30am, 6 Mar 2020Updated: 6:36am, 6 Mar 2020

China has started tests on a new earthquake monitoring system that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to measure seismic activity in the southwest provinces of Yunnan and Sichuan.

The fully automated system, which is designed to process huge amounts of seismic data, is expected to fast-track earthquake prediction to within two seconds based on established source parameters, according to a report on Wednesday by Science and Technology Daily, the official newspaper of the Ministry of Science and Technology.

It is expected to replace current methods, which typically require a professional on standby to work on algorithms and manually calculate certain earthquake parameters such as epicentre, magnitude, time and depth based on seismic wave signals.

The tests mark a further escalation of efforts to apply AI technology across a range of sectors in China, the world’s second largest economy and location of some of the most deadly earthquakes in history. The 1976 Tangshan earthquake in northern Hebei province, for example, was a magnitude 7.6 tremor that resulted in the deaths of at least 242,000 people.

China’s latest major seismic disaster was the magnitude 8 Sichuan earthquake in 2008, with more than 87,000 fatalities.

Developed by the University of Science and Technology of China and the China Earthquake Administration, the new AI-enabled quake monitoring system is a six-year research project that has been put on a one-year trial in the two provinces, according to the Science and Technology Daily report.